Sunday, April 6, 2008

David Caruso's minimalist performance

......Playing opposite the sun-baked city of silicone - Miami - is the second key ingredient, David Caruso.

You would have to search deep in the Siberian wastelands to find a being who looks less comfortable in the quasi-tropical glare of Florida. He plays the criminal pathologist Horatio Caine, which is inspired casting because Caruso knows a lot about death, having died a lonely one himself after he left NYPD Blue to become "a Hollywood superstar".
"Kiss of Death" was the prescient title of Caruso's brief and unhappy spell as a leading man. Audiences found his scrawny ginger features strangely resistible when displayed on the 30x60ft dimensions of a cinema screen.

In truth, even on the small screen Caruso's appeal had been a little mystifying. Radio was the more natural medium for his looks. But on NYPD Blue, through the combination of a soft voice and hard stare, he managed to fill the position of the tough skinny cop that had been vacant in popular culture since Frank Sinatra's 1968 role in The Detective. Like Sinatra before his comeback in From Here To Eternity, Caruso went from here to obscurity.

If he has returned from the dead in CSI: Miami, he still wears the pallor of a corpse. That's with his sunglasses on. When he takes them off he looks more like Caruso went out for a drink in NYC and woke up in Miami squinting, dry-mouthed, and plagued by horrifying flashbacks.

But the fragile Caruso need not worry. As this is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, he does not have to contend with anything so burdensome as acting. Each week he turns in the kind of minimalist performance that can't lose much in Latin American and Asian dubbing suites.
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Superb review by
Andrew Anthony http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843255,00.html
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